Ky. reports 5K new COVID cases as hospitals struggle with surge in respiratory viruses
Kentucky continues to see a post-Thanksgiving rise in COVID-19 cases, even as several Central Kentucky hospitals say they’re running out of beds.
Thursday, Baptist Health Richmond released a public service announcement asking the public to do its part to relieve stress on health care workers dealing with an emergency room backlog. The video message featured hospital staff who said they were doing their best amid surging flu, coronavirus and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) cases.
Also Thursday, a spokesperson for UK HealthCare said Chandler Hospital in Lexington and Kentucky Children’s Hospital were either at or close to capacity.
Increased strain locally comes as China prepares to roll back its restrictive approach to containing COVID-19. Public health experts predict this will lead to more cases in the U.S. and possibly new coronavirus variants.
Here’s what you need to know about where Kentucky stands with COVID-19 as the Christmas and New Year’s holidays approach.
Latest COVID-19 data
During his weekly news conference Thursday, Gov. Andy Beshear cast the state of the coronavirus pandemic in Kentucky in a mostly positive light.
“This is our post-Thanksgiving bump, but it’s nothing like it used to be,” Beshear said, referring to the latest map from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention displaying COVID-19 community levels across Kentucky.
A county’s COVID-19 “community level,” according to the CDC, is calculated using:
New cases per 100,000 people using a seven-day total
New hospital admissions for COVID-19 per 100,000 people using a seven-day total
The percentage of inpatient hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients
The CDC uses this metric to help guide public health recommendations. For example, individuals living in counties at high should wear a mask while indoors in public and practice physical distancing.
Central Kentucky hospitals ‘at or over capacity’ amid swell of RSV, COVID and flu cases
As of Thursday, the latest available update from the CDC, 15 Kentucky counties were experiencing high COVID-19 community levels. Those counties were Ballard, Carlisle, Crittenden, Elliott, Graves, Greenup, Hickman, Livingston, Lyon, Marshall, McCracken, Menifee, Morgan, Nicholas and Rowan.
Another 28 counties fell into the medium category, leaving 77 at low community levels.
Beshear went on to describe what he called a “plateau” in Kentucky’s new cases. They may be on the rise, but the peaks were nowhere near the highs the state saw in January and February, and they are overall leveling off, he contended.
The governor also acknowledged the state’s positivity rate has been increasing for several weeks and “that’s probably a pretty good sign of a post-Thanksgiving bump.”
But, he said, it’s “nothing like the jumps that we used to see.”
The state reported 5,214 new cases for the week ending Dec. 12, along with 51 new deaths. That’s up from a month ago, when Kentucky officials were reporting 3,570 new cases the second week of November.
Hospital admissions for severe COVID-19 have also been “leveling off,” and ventilator use among those patients has been declining since the end of January, Beshear noted.
But epidemiologists have pointed out the problems with those data points and their use as definitive markers of where the pandemic stands in real time.
Official case numbers really only represent the “tip of the iceberg,” and although they may seem low at any given point in time, true COVID-19 infections may be up to 20 times higher.
Investment in tracking COVID-19 at the state and local levels has fallen dramatically, and PCR tests have become harder to access. The at-home tests people take when they think they have COVID-19 often aren’t counted at all.
Hospitalization data also has problems because it often lags weeks behind cases.
Many public health experts are now turning to wastewater surveillance as a more consistent indicator than constantly fluctuating case rates.
The latest CDC data shows elevated levels of community transmission for COVID-19 across Kentucky, compared to the previous reporting period of Dec. 8 to 14.
COVID-19 in Fayette County
Fayette County is currently classified by the CDC as having a low COVID-19 community level.
Still, the county saw 302 additional cases through Dec. 14, which the CDC noted as a near 40% increase over the previous reporting period. It did not report the exact number of new deaths during that period.
Fayette County’s positivity rate is north of 8%, though it’s likely higher given that at-home tests don’t show up in that measure.
Biden administration resumes mailing free Covid tests
Americans can once again order four free COVID-19 tests through the mail, after President Joe Biden’s administration resumed the initiative Thursday.
The tests can be ordered via COVIDtests.gov, with shipment starting the week of Dec. 19.
Do you have a question about the coronavirus in Kentucky for our service journalism team? We’d like to hear from you. Fill out our Know Your Kentucky form or email ask@herald-leader.com.
